Picturing One Brooklyn Family’s Life and Love

Too much weight is often placed on the value of an outsider’s vision, presumed to be clear and unfettered. But what of the insider? He who can witness more intimately what the outsider cannot. That has long been Rafael Rios’s prerogative. The New York–based photographer’s images center on his extended Puerto Rican family, many of whom have lived in the same Fort Greene house since his aunt and uncle bought it in the early 1980s. Growing up, he and his parents lived on the top floor, his cousins on the second, and his aunt and uncle on the ground floor. His work tells the story of this house as much as it does that of his family members. And both are memorialized in his aptly titled 2018 book, Family, which contains images taken over an eight-year period, from 1999 to 2007.

Multigenerational living is common among Latinx and other immigrant families in New York, driven by economic necessity and tight-knit family values. In the mountainside village, in the Dominican Republic, where my family is from, relatives often live in clusters—small, multihued houses built near enough to each other that one can easily pop in for coffee or make lunch a neighborhood affair.

In New York, driven by necessity, my extended family replicated that communal living. We grew up in two- or three-bedroom apartments where every second at home was a shared one, every space communal. My father bought his own home when I was a teenager, and we all moved in there, separated only by wooden beams and drywall. This sort of setup is becoming more common in the United States. A 2016 analysis of census data indicated that 20 percent of the population, or sixty-four million people, were living with multiple generations in a home—particularly in Latinx and Asian households. Rios documents the intimacy of this arrangement in his photographs.

Over the years, Rios has captured his family at play and at rest, braiding one another’s hair or lying twisted in an embrace. When his aunt got sick, he took his camera to the hospital and photographed her cackling into a ventilator and later, at home, family members crowding into bed with her. “Families gather for parties, or when something bad is happening,” Rios says. He shows his family in various states of gathering, for both quotidian and special occasions. Rios also presents the same people in different contexts, and across time.

Gathering is much more difficult and dangerous now, during the pandemic, and the focus of Rios’s camera has necessarily narrowed, homing in on his partner, Jassine, and his daughter, René, who was born in June of 2020. “All of René’s life has been in quarantine,” Rios tells me. He returned to the family home and took a photograph of his mother standing in front of a framed portrait of herself from Family, wearing a mask and sanitizer in hand, seemingly mid-pump. She held René for the first time only recently. In another image, Jassine sits on a park bench with René, a black mask pulled down underneath her chin.

These photographs reflect how the pandemic is forcing us all into isolation, testing our bonds. When I got COVID 19 in late November, many family members dropped medicinal teas and food at my doorstep. One night, my aunt came by. She left tearfully saying, “I love you,” and “I can’t be with you.” As if trying to reconcile the two statements. There is joy in gathering, but perhaps there is a different sort of connection to be found in our new reality, a renegotiation of family love—an air kiss rather than a physical one, a delayed reunion rather than a tragic one.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Family.”